Welcome to the July edition of the Free Press Update, our monthly newsletter. Ready to dig into everything we’ve been up to in the last month?

Tell Majority Leader Schumer: Hold a Floor Vote for FCC Nominees Before the August Recess!

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has remained in an unprecedented 2–2 deadlock since January 2021, the result of efforts by the phone, cable and broadcast lobbies to hamstring the agency that oversees their businesses. After years of advocacy from Free Press Action and our allies, we finally have our best chance yet to get a fully functional FCC.

We need Majority Leader Schumer to act: Add your name to our petition urging Schumer to hold a floor vote for FCC nominees Anna Gomez and Geoffrey Starks before the August recess.

Free Press Co-CEO Craig Aaron Goes to the White House and Reflects on How Much the Debate Over Broadband Has Changed

Last month, Free Press Co-CEO Craig Aaron headed to the White House for the official announcement of $42 billion in broadband funding via the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program. This money will help all 50 states build high-speed internet networks in communities that lack access.

This investment marks an important recognition that the United States should treat broadband as an essential utility that must be affordable to everyone. This wasn’t always the case. Read Craig’s reflections on just how far we’ve come and how much closer we are to truly ending the digital divide once and for all.

Threads vs. Twitter: A Cage Match with Few Real Winners

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are going toe to toe in more than one arena. Their latest cage match is over the future of micro-blogging, the social-media format that involves short posts shared with followers on a networked platform.

Enter Zuckerberg, who earlier this month launched Threads, a Twitter-like platform that’s available to Meta’s 500 million active Instagram users. In less than a week, 100 million people opted to join, reaching a critical mass of users large enough to threaten Twitter’s micro-blogging dominance.

But before you take Threads for a test drive, it’s worth taking a long look under the hood. At a systemic level, Threads shares many of Twitter’s deficiencies. Read our analysis.

Republicans Are Still Afraid of Big Bird

The House GOP has been busy attacking everything and everyone that doesn’t fit into their narrow view of American culture.

It’s a list that includes history teachers, children’s books, racial-justice protesters, indebted students, women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, voting rights and so on.

And now we can add Big Bird and journalist Judy Woodruff to their litany of perceived threats. ICYMI, here's Timothy Karr's look at the continued attacks on public media.

A View From the Field

Check out the latest updates from the field as Free Press and Free Press Action staffers work alongside our amazing allies and activists to create a more just and equitable media system. Below are just a few snippets from our monthly View from the Field blog — you can read the entire post here!

• Nora Benavidez led a policy workshop at RightsCon about non-English-language disinformation, election integrity and the fight for civil and human rights. The workshop drew on the Free Press report Empty Promises: Inside Big Tech’s Weak Effort to Fight Hate and Lies in 2022, which Nora wrote, as well as the work of the Change the Terms coalition. “Throughout history, lies and propaganda have been used to subvert people’s faith in institutions and each other and to otherwise obfuscate truth,” Nora said during the discussion. “Yet these threats are even more potent in the digital age.”
• Joshua Stager took part in a panel discussion at “Closing the Digital Divide: The Affordable Connectivity Program on the Ground and in D.C.” The ACP is an FCC program that subsidizes high-speed internet access for people who are living near the poverty line or enrolled in federal aid programs like Medicaid and SNAP. The conversation examined large-scale bipartisan initiatives aimed at closing the digital divide and advancing digital equity.
• Venneikia Williams spoke at the Decolonizing Wealth conference in Atlanta about the narrative history of reparations. The panel discussion explored how defeating harmful narratives and amplifying helpful ones can energize support for local, state and national reparations efforts.

Thank you for reading! The info here represents only a small fraction of what Free Press and Free Press Action are doing every day to fight for your rights to connect and communicate. Will you donate today to power our work forward? We’re hoping to hit our goal of 100 donations before the end of July, so any amount you can give makes a meaningful difference. Thank you!

More soon,

All of us at Free Press and Free Press Action
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Photo credit of Big Bird: Original photo by Flickr user U.S. Department of State